Independent Thinking in a Red-Blue Town

A few years ago "soccer moms" were all the rage among political consultants. Then it was "NASCAR dads." But only 4-5 percent of voters really fit the "soccer mom" profile, and only 2 percent were "NASCAR dads." Tomorrow Cato will release a study showing that there are far more libertarian voters than soccer moms or NASCAR dads. Maybe politicos should pay attention to them.
My former colleague David Kirby, now executive director of America's Future Foundation, obtained data sets from Gallup, Pew Research Center, and the American National Election Studies. He did some original calculations to find libertarians in those polls, and then he and I wrote up the results. Without scooping our own story, I'll just say that we found that a substantial percentage of voters are libertarian -- not libertarians who can compare and contrast Hayek and Rand, but people whose views on broad issues distinguish them from both liberals and conservatives.
We think our data undermine the whole idea these days that the electorate is polarized, that everybody's either red or blue, that there's no more swing vote. Indeed, one of the most interesting things we found is that libertarians are a swing vote. They voted very differently in 2004 from most previous years. How? Check our homepage Thursday.